The Abbey (1819)

The Abbey, Gunnery School

In 1819, on Washington Green, a meeting house was constructed on the site where the Judea Parish House stands today. The building had a large upstairs space for town and church meetings and the walls were lined with shelves that held the town’s first library. The first floor had several rooms. These were used for a time by the Judea Female Seminary, run by Mary Brinsmade, sister-in-law of Frederick W. Gunn, founder of the Gunnery School. In the 1870s, Gunn moved the building to its current location (16 Kirby Road), attaching a former one-room district school house to the rear. After Gunn‘s death in 1881, the house was the residence of his widow, Abigail Irene Brinsmade Gunn, familiarly known to Gunnery students as Aunt Abbey. For several years the house was a dormitory for the Gunnery School known as The Abbey. In 1912 it again became a private residence. It was remodeled by its new owners, who added a north wing around 1919-1925.

Benjamin Clark House (1827)

19 Long Hill Rd., Middle Haddam

Various construction dates can be found for the house at 19 Long Hill Road in Middle Haddam (in the Town of East Hampton). In the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Middle Haddam Historic District, it is listed as the Benjamin Clark House, built in 1827. Clark sold the property a few years later. Steamboat captain Heman H. Crosby lived in the house in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century it became the home of Raymond Peck, an engineer at Pratt & Whitney, and his wife, Helen Bates Peck. After her husband’s death in 1969, Helen Peck (1909-2008) continued to reside in Middle Haddam. According to her obituary in the Hartford Courant she was an active volunteer and a historic resource who was instrumental in Middle Haddam being listed in the National Register of Historic Places. In her later years, Peck was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. A 2003 article in the Hartford Courant (“Neighbors Stir Up A Probate Debate,” by Gregory Seay, May 17, 2003) describes issues that some neighbors had with renovations made to the property (called Mulberry Farm) by Peck’s court-appointed conservator. The article describes the house as being 155 years old (giving it a date of 1848). The sign in front of the house reads: “Mulberry Farm Circa 1841 Helen B. Peck.”

Charles Pomeroy Ives House (1875)

18 Totoket Rd., Branford

The house at 18 Totoket Road in Branford was built c. 1860-1875 for Charles Pomeroy Ives (1847-1933). An 1872 graduate of Yale Law School, Ives was a lawyer and farmer (also described as a “farmer-philosopher”) who was the first in Connecticut to market milk bottles. He had a 200-acre dairy farm in Branford called Fellsmere Farm. In 1933, at the age of 87, Ives went missing from his farm. His body was found three days later a mile-and-a-half from his home. He had died from exhaustion and exposure. Starting in 1983 the house was substantially altered: the windows, siding and other exterior features were replaced and the interior was gutted.

Rev. Joseph Ayer House (1825)

Rev. Joseph Ayer House

Reverend Joseph Ayer (1793-1875) was pastor of the Congregational Church in North Stonington from 1825 to 1837. Sometime during that period his house, located at 94 Main Street, was built. He then moved to Sprague where he became minister of the Hanover Congregational Church. North Stonington village was once known as Milltown and as related in his obituary in The Congregational Quarterly, Vol. XIX, No. 2 (April, 1877):

At the time he commenced his residence in Milltown, a village within the bounds of his parish, there were in that small village ten places in which intoxicating liquors were sold in larger or smaller quantities, — eight stores, and two taverns. Within a short time he was permitted to see them all closed, or cleansed of the fumes of alcohol, — an achievement hardly to be paralleled in the annals of the temperance reform.